PHP is a nightmare, but only once you learn enough about programming or development to understand what you should really be doing, and only once you've seen how other languages do it.
After that comes PHP's special flavour of OOP. I'd prefer to call it 'Do Whatever The Fuck You Like Orientated Programming' given the abundance of 'magic methods' and other functions that try really hard to make sure you've got a cheeky workaround for something you can't be bothered doing properly (creating countless security issues in the process). And that's before you start using classes as pseudo-namespaces for collections of static functions.
The disappointing side is that someone who learns PHP before anything else will have a heart attack when they realise that very little of what they know applies the same to another language.
It's so loose and care-free that it doesn't care what you do or how you do it. (Not helped by the mountains of useless tutorials and documentation that teach awfully bad practices.)
So I guess the thing I dislike about PHP is that I learnt to use it but it didn't give me good programming skills.
> It's so loose and care-free that it doesn't care what you do or how you do it.
This is precisely why I fell in love with PHP. My first was BASIC, my second was C, my third was Java, but my fourth ... oh god ... like that slutty girl who will let you do absolutely anything. How can you not fall in love with that?
All I can really say is that I'm getting fed up of it. In keeping with your analogy, I'd certainly prefer one that gave me the odd slap and told me to get my shit together if I tried pushing my luck.
(programming languages and sado-masochistic tendencies would be an interesting avenue to explore...)
After that comes PHP's special flavour of OOP. I'd prefer to call it 'Do Whatever The Fuck You Like Orientated Programming' given the abundance of 'magic methods' and other functions that try really hard to make sure you've got a cheeky workaround for something you can't be bothered doing properly (creating countless security issues in the process). And that's before you start using classes as pseudo-namespaces for collections of static functions.
The disappointing side is that someone who learns PHP before anything else will have a heart attack when they realise that very little of what they know applies the same to another language.
It's so loose and care-free that it doesn't care what you do or how you do it. (Not helped by the mountains of useless tutorials and documentation that teach awfully bad practices.)
So I guess the thing I dislike about PHP is that I learnt to use it but it didn't give me good programming skills.